Motorola To Split In Two

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that Motorola plans to reorganize itself into two independent publicly held companies by the first quarter of 2011. The first company will own the Motorola brand and will include Motorola's mobile handset unit and home set-top box business. This new company will focus on the 'three screens' lifestyle envisioned by carriers like AT&T and Verizon, where customers would watch content on TV, on their computers, and on their mobile phones. The other company emerging from the split will include Motorola's wireless networking business and its enterprise radio systems operations. The wireless networking business would likely be sold off, leaving the second company with its profitable enterprise radio systems business, which generated $7 billion of the company's $22 billion in sales in 2009."

Comments

Ehh... And there were times

[RCL]

When Motorola was a processor brand. And a good one. Ehh...

The end of a giant.

[kurt555gs]

Motorola forgot that the reason people bought their products was because they were the best in the world. Not the cheapest. The best. When Galvin Sr. ran the company, Motorola radios were the finest on Earth. Motorola brought us the 1st transistor TV, Quasar, the G4 chip was great. Iridium was a great idea, ruined by Galvin Jr. When Motorola was run by engineers, it thrived, even though it's products were usually the most expensive in the industry. Once the accountants and stock swindlers got hold of it, there was a race to the bottom, and this is the end result. The MBA's just can not conceive that people will pay for quality and innovation. Being cheapest, cutting R&D, Ugh, I could go on, but I think you know what I mean.

So long Motorola! It was a good run.

Re:The end of a giant.

[samkass]

I'm not sure why you say this split in particular is the end-- Motorola has done this sort of thing a couple times already. In fact I work for a division of General Dynamics that was once Motorola. There's also Freescale, which used to be Motorola's microprocessor unit. They seem to like being a certain size and when they grow beyond it they divide.

Re:The end of a giant.

[DrDitto]

Iridium was a terrible idea devised by engineers with an ill-thought out business plan. The business model could *never* succeed by simple math (i.e., the max capacity of the Iridium system was so small that it could really never be profitable). The worst part of Iridium was that it was an engineering drain on the rest of the company. Some of our best cellphone engineers got sucked into making cellular plug-in cards for Iridium handsets.

BTW-- I used to work for Motorola as a software engineer on handsets. It was a lousy experience.

Re:The end of a giant.

[kurt555gs]

Oh, I forgot, the 68000. The best computer chip of the era!

Re:The end of a giant.

[kent_eh]

They seem to like being a certain size and when they grow beyond it they divide.

That may be incredibly wise of them.
I've worked for a couple of companies who started off very innovative and did a lot of smart things until they grew above a certain size. Then they became bloated, bureaucratic and stopped innovating. And the bigger they got the more concerned with internal processes they became, yet the less profitable they became.
I've lived inside that twice, and I've seen it happen to countless other companies.

Woohoo!

[Colin Smith]

Thanks Motorola, AT&T and Verizon. I can now watch TV on three... THREE whole screens. What a lifestyle those guys will allow me.

ok. let me put it this way. TV is shit. It is soul sucking garbage of the shallowest most inane kind.

If this is all the "executives" can come up with, the company is better off dead. Kill it. Kill it before the USA becomes known as the Zombie Nation.